Rally supports migrant workers, boycott of N.C. pickle company
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, November 15, 2000
ATLANTA – John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, and national and local union officials led a lightly attended rally Nov. 15 to urge the National Council of Churches to call for a boycott of a pickle company in North Carolina.
On Nov. 17, the final day of its annual meeting, the NCC General Assembly will consider a resolution that may include a request to boycott the Mount Olive Pickle Co., which does not hire migrant workers but does purchase cucumbers from farmers who use migrant labor to harvest the crop.
The NCC staff gave Thomas and the union leaders lunch-hour use of the General Assembly meeting room in the Crown Plaza Ravinia in Atlanta. But Robert Edgar, general secretary of the NCC, said he had turned down a request from officials at Mount Olive Pickle Co. to have a chance to answer criticism by the unions.
Edgar was one of about 25 people, including several Atlanta union members, who attended the rally. The registration for the General Assembly was more than 220 – so the vast majority of the delegates and NCC staff decided to go to lunch rather than to sing This Little Light of Mine and union songs and listen to speeches.
Mount Olive Pickle Co. is the target of farm workers and a few church groups. They say that if the pickle company becomes organized, the union will be able to use the company to exert more pressure on farmers to pay migrant workers higher wages and improve working conditions.
Thomas, a delegate to the NCC and a member of its executive board, has been in the forefront of the effort to get the NCC General Assembly to call for a national boycott of Mount Olive Pickle. He told the rally that the UCC – “to date” – is the only NCC communion that has called for a boycott.
“In the waters of baptism, we find renewal and refreshment,” Thomas said. “But we cannot celebrate that baptism while children in North Carolina drink water that is tainted and causes them illness and death.” Thomas did not specify how many – if any – children of farm workers have died from tainted water.
Thomas also said, “We cannot speak with integrity about an expanded table unless we speak of those who cannot be at our table … simply because they are poor.”
He opposed efforts by some NCC delegates to tone down the resolution and not call for a boycott of the family- and employee-owned pickle company, which has been a corporate leader in the small town of Mount Olive. Instead, they prefer that the NCC take a “leadership role” in ongoing negotiations between unions and farm workers and the pickle company.
“The National Council of Churches is really not called upon to offer leadership in this struggle,” he said. “We already have leaders. We are called upon not to lead, but to follow … follow with our solidarity, follow with our support and follow with our participation.”
Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO, said there was a dysfunctional relationship between Mount Olive Pickle Co. and migrant workers, and that Christians, as pastors, should be about the business of reconciliation “between the exploiter and the exploited.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to intervene and shout people into reality,” he said. “Mount Olive is in denial. If we really love Mount Olive Pickle Co. we have to get them to accept reality for their sake.”
He acknowledged that Mount Olive Pickle Co. does not hire migrant workers, but “the truth is that the pickle’s in the jar.”
Velasquez said the conditions of migrant workers is a form of ongoing slavery.
NCC President Andrew Young, who invokes the memory of Martin Luther King in almost all of his comments, said Dr. King “was killed in large measure because he expanded the struggle beyond race. He began talking about all poor people … trying to help America see that poverty is immoral, it’s unjust and it’s unnecessary.”
Without specifically addressing the boycott of the pickle company, Young said he fully supported the union organizing efforts, recalling that he encouraged police workers to organize when he was mayor of Atlanta. “Democracy makes sense for poor people, just as capitalism makes sense for poor people,” Young said. “Dr. King used to say that by keeping a man down in the gutter, you’ve got to keep one foot down in the gutter with him.”
He told the rally that he was proud of his denomination – the United Church of Christ – because it was willing to step out on justice issues even when they were controversial. “The whole time I was in the civil rights movement, I was on the staff of the United Church of Christ. Hosea Williams was there by assignment of Presbyterians and when he was raising a lot of hell, Presbyterians didn’t know they were paying for it.”